Guards

How to spell guards

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce guards

What does guards mean?

1. nounPeople employed to watch over, defend, or supervise a person, place, or thing.
2. verbWatches over or protects something so as to keep it safe.

Guards in a sentence

• noun

  Two guards stood at the entrance to the vault.

• verb

  A tall fence guards the entire warehouse perimeter.

• noun

  The prison guards changed shifts at midnight.

• verb

  She carefully guards her password and never writes it down.

Where does guards come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back to Old French garder or guarder, meaning 'to watch over, keep safe, or protect', which English borrowed in the late 1400s. That French verb itself grew from a Frankish (and broadly Germanic) root wardon, meaning 'to watch or guard', the same ancestor that gave English the native word 'ward'. This explains a tidy pair of doublets: 'guard' came through French while 'ward' descended directly through Old English, yet both share one meaning. The hard 'g' spelled 'gu' reflects how Norman French rendered the Germanic 'w' sound, which is exactly why the word opens with that slightly odd 'gua' cluster rather than 'gw' or plain 'w'. By the 1500s the noun for a protector and the verb for protecting were both firmly settled in English, and the plural and third-person form simply add the regular '-s'.

How the word is built

• guard (to watch over, protect)
• -s (plural noun ending, or third-person singular verb ending)